“That the kind they used for the secret war?”
“Yep. STOL. Short-take-off-and-landing for the CIA airstrips they had scattered around the tops of mountains and in the narrow valleys. Quick in, quick out.”
The men investigated gullies and the trees around the area and found more pieces, but so far no sign of the grave.
Porter went over the fuselage. “No bullet shrapnel holes in the skin that I can see.”
Now that they had the wreckage, the grave couldn’t be far away. Kiera looked again at the hand drawn map. “There’s got to be a rock formation somewhere under the ground cover. It’s to the south of here.”
She and Porter headed back to the area where the marker was. She felt Porter’s hand on her arm.
“You made it.”
She nodded. “Yes. Thanks to you and these men. Let’s find the grave.”
43
Kiera and Porter walked due south, angled up a rise to some flatter ground and stopped. They stood in the middle of dense undergrowth—rock, a copse of bamboo off to the south about twenty yards away and some clearing covered in tangle roots, vines and brush.
“It’s here somewhere,” she said, feeling a little queasy inside at how close she was. “Has to be in this general area. All the features are right.”
They walked back to where the ground flattened and ran toward some very large boulders.
She and Porter studied the diary page with the landmarks and directions.
“It should be”—she pointed to a formation of boulders—”right about there. We’re very close.”
“We could be standing on it and wouldn’t know,” Porter said, looking around. “Forty years does a lot in these jungles.”
She stared at the mass of vines, roots and growth that blanketed the ground then shifted to her left as she studied the drawings of landmarks her grandfather had drawn of the mountains across the valley, those oddly shaped chess pieces. He had drawn them exactly as they were in the background. There was a big stone with a line cut into it. That’s what she needed to find.
Porter, meanwhile, went over and talked to Phommasanh and when he came back he said, “The Hmong are getting anxious about how much time it is taking. I assured them we were in the area and we need everyone looking. We’ll find it.”
The monks alongside the Hmong organized a grid search, everyone hacking and tearing into the thick weeds and heavy fronds for a formation of stones that Kiera had described to them.
As the daylight waned a strong wind roared up through the ravines shaking and rattling the trees.
In a mossy tangle she finally found the marking carved into the stone. Her heart raced. “I think I got it,” Kiera said, excited.
She followed the marking with line of sight, then walked ten yards and found a formation of stones buried in the undergrowth.
“That’s definitely it. That’s the formation he described.”
She pointed to one of the boulder piles in a mix of bamboo and shrub growth.
They pulled back a heavy mat of vines, fallen limbs and leaves about a foot thick. Bugs and rodents scurried off during the uncovering.
“She’s got it,” Porter yelled.
The men rushed over with great excitement.
The grave itself was covered with a bed of small rocks.
Nearby lay two poles and there appeared to be leather straps connecting them. Porter suggested if her grandfather had to move something heavy, especially given he was himself banged up, he’d most likely have made a gurney of some kind.
Kiera knelt down and began moving some of the stones. Then she sat back on her haunches to let the moment settle. Again she had the feeling this was a key moment in her own history, in who she had become as a person.
Porter and the monks worked to clear the grave.
“We can still get out before it gets dark, Porter said. “Make life a lot easier getting off this mountain.”
Kiera wasn’t interested in anything at the moment but what was in the grave and the reality that she was actually here at the spot where her grandfather had buried his colleague and the golden elephant.
She watched the men rip up creepers and shrub growth and rotting limbs. Below that lay a large group of stones marking the length and breadth of the grave. She noticed it was wider than necessary for just a body.
She began to see her grandfather through the eyes of the small band of diehard holdouts. And she reflected on that time, that world. The violence, the hopelessness, and the men like her grandfather who couldn’t accept a lost cause until the bitter last day. And not even then. He was a man who’d planned on starting a counter-revolution that had never happened.
Looking back, it seemed so fantastic to her. Almost incomprehensible what had happened.
The monks and Hmong worked furiously to clear away the last of the rocks and dirt and then they came to a piece of the fuselage covering the grave. Creatures scurried off.
They pulled the piece off and now they could see what was beneath. It was a moment when it seemed no one breathed. They had come a long way to get to this moment and the tension was heavy.
There was a body wrapped in a poncho and beside it a crate.
Porter knelt beside the body and carefully pulled the poncho away to reveal the skeleton.
The next thing to be removed was a shroud of rotted cloth. “Probably was a parachute,” Porter said. It disintegrated at his touch.
The skeleton had pants, shirt and boots, but they were mostly gone to dust.
She knelt and took hold of a corner of the material and began to pull it back, a cold feeling in the bottom of her stomach, her pulse ratcheting up.
The skeleton itself appeared at first to be pretty much intact.
“Porter said, “Usually, all people get is a fragment, osseous tissue that gets sent to a lab in Hawaii for tests. And guys on the Lao Alpha List, which your grandfather and this guy were, were officially not searched for because they didn’t officially exist because there was no official war in Laos.”
Phommasanh removed from his pack a poncho and some cloth for her to wrap the bones in.
Porter squatted down and touched one of the bones. “Over the years the weight of a skeleton becomes about thirteen percent of healthy previous body weight, to about half that. Maybe less than fifteen pounds left of a man who once weighed two hundred.”
Kiera watched how he worked, the care and precision as he pulled away some remnants of what looked like leather. Bone fragments fell off.
He carefully retrieved the larger pieces. “Ribs broken. Pelvis crushed. If he survived for any time he would have been in some serious pain.”
Kiera spread out the tight woven cloth the monks had brought with them. The remains were to be removed first.
Next to the body was a two-foot-wide crate and beside it there was a green metal container the size of a small suitcase.
“Every family of every MIA has the same hope,” Porter said. “They’d much rather walk into some bar in Bangkok and see some long haired, greybeard knocking down shots. It’s happened, but not very often.”
“You mean a Charles McKean.”
“Yeah, a Charles McKean.”
The clothing that had survived fell apart the moment anything was moved. Leather and canvas boots, belt buckle, ball cap that had been placed beside the head were the pieces that had survived the best.
Now, the larger portions of the skeleton. They put the leg bones and then the hip bones up on the poncho. Two of the monks wrapped them carefully in cloth.
Every move was in slow motion as Porter removed the skeleton. Each piece removed with the care of an archeologist. Each piece placed on the cloth.
Kiera began to figure out how to put the pieces together tightly to fit in her backpack.
Porter put the fragments into a plastic bag from his backpack that had been emptied of supplies.
Attempts to preserve the integrity of the rib cage failed. Finally they had everything out but the skull.
Porter lifted it out last. He was about to hand it to her when he paused to look at something.
As he was about to wrap the skull he stopped.
Kiera glanced at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
Porter finished wrapping the skull.
She grabbed his arm. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
He hesitated. “Could mean anything.”
“Porter, what do you think that hole is? A bullet hole?” She knew, but hoped it wasn’t
“Yes, could be.”
She knew instantly that she was looking at something that might answer the big question why her grandfather never came back here to find the plane. Something he’d done, maybe had to do, but couldn’t face later, and it had prevented him from coming back.
44
Kiera didn’t know how to react. Her mind seemed to stumble as she sought some other explanation than the obvious and its implications.
After unwrapping it, Kiera held the skull in her hands and stared at what logic told her was a bullet hole. “Maybe there was a fight with some communists.”
Porter nodded, but she saw that he didn’t really believe that for a moment.
We can’t really know what happened, she thought defensively.
Porter moved the skull around and pointed to the inside. “My educated guess is the bullet hole indicates it entered high on the back of the cranium and exited through an eye, and probably very close range, killing instantly.”
“You can know that?”
“Blast force leaves a specific impact print depending on caliber and range. I’ve seen bullet holes in skulls. Piles of them, actually.”
“Then the only explanation is that my grandfather shot him.”
“I’m not a forensics expert…but yes, that’s a possibility given the circumstances. Injured bad enough, no way out, the man may have requested to be put out of his misery. If, that is, we’re looking at a bullet hole.”
“You don’t have any real doubt, do you?”
He shrugged. “It’s a good guess, but there’s not much to gain from guessing.”
“There weren’t bullet holes anywhere in the plane?”
Porter shook his head. “No. Not that we could find.”
She unzipped the expanders and lengtheners to widen her backpack so they could get everything to fit.
Holding the skull carefully with both hands, Kiera put it in the top attached pocket of her pack. She covered it with a piece of silk cloth and a poncho given to her by Tang.
Porter said, “The crate behind his seat in the cabin broke free on impact. So he was crushed. Broke him up good. Most likely he was dying and in terrible pain. Under the circumstances, given the guy was in misery and had no hope of survival, what could your grandfather do?”
“I’ll look at it as a Sophie’s Choice situation,” Kiera said. “That explains a lot. What a decision to have to make.”
“Nothing could be worse and yet unavoidable. A mercy killing to avoid a worse fate. No way could he take a fatally injured man with him. You saw the breaks in the skeleton. Those happened in the crash. And he couldn’t leave him here to die slow and be eaten by animals while he was still alive. My guess is that’s exactly the scenario. He did the only humane thing he could do. And it would have taken incredible pain and courage to do it and would be something you never get over.”
“It makes sense but it’s really sad,” Kiera said. It was another one of those puzzles about her grandfather that now fell into place.
She studied the items left on the cloth of her grandfather’s colleague. A watch, a ring and the hat with the eagle wings on front and the rice stalks on the bill. And the remains of a leather wallet with no IDs, along with several ruined pictures. A life leaving behind fragments, but his family would be happy to get the mementoes and the bones.
“The morality of everyday life is not the morality of emergencies,” Porter said, maybe trying to ease her mind. “In crisis, you have to do what the circumstance demands of you.”
She appreciated his attempt, but she’d already reached a conclusion and it satisfied her as an explanation she could live with. “The trauma of having to kill a colleague to save him from a miserable, slow death had to be one of the ultimate horrors for sure.”
Porter asked, “What did he tell the family?”
“I don’t know what he told them. Or if he told them anything. He never really told me much of anything. He never really talked about his war at all. It was almost a taboo subject.”
The dreadfulness of what her grandfather had had to do to a man he was so close with filled her with sadness. She tried to envision the moment, how excruciating it must have been. It was beyond normal comprehension.
With the remains now secure in her backpack, Phommasanh directed the men to take out the large crate that was in the grave next to where the body had been. It wasn’t very big, maybe two feet long and nearly as high. After a nudge, and the subsequent effort it took to move it, it was obviously heavy.
She looked at Porter as the men struggled to get the box out and onto the ground next to the grave. “How is someone injured, as he apparently was, still able to move something this heavy even with that stretcher-thing he made?”
“People do amazing things under extreme duress,” Porter said.
The monks, led by Narith, were given the task and honor, of opening the crate.
Kiera watched, barely breathing as they removed the wood and metal outer box and then the heavy wrapping to reveal a stunning female warrior astride a golden elephant, identical to the photo.
The statue appeared to be solid gold festooned with jewels, mostly jade. The elephant’s trunk and tusks flared out, the mouth open in a trumpet yell at full charge. The workmanship had astounding detail. The woman warrior held a jade-tipped staff in her right hand. Her jade eyes were cut bold and defiant. The eyes of an angry lioness.
“My, oh my,” Porter said. “I have a feeling we might just be looking at the real deal.”
“The She-King,” Narith said, squatting next to the statue and shining a small flashlight to study the statue closer. Next to him the Vietnamese monks looked to be in a kind of rapture.
Kiera stared at the face of the girl on the golden elephant. She was magnificent. She leaned in closer and it was just unbelievable how alive the statue seemed. The workmanship superb.
The monks discussed with awe every detail of the five-hundred-year-old icon as if they’d found the Holy Grail.
Porter’s attention turned to a metal box the size of a small suitcase that had been buried next to the statue. One of the monks jumped back into the grave and retrieved it. The box looked to have been painted military green in its past. Porter removed the dirt with his hand and studied the lock and the latch.
He took a heavy K-bar knife from one of Phommasanh’s men and shoved it behind the corner of the latch. He was about to ram it down with his foot when a noise stopped them all.
Everyone turned toward the jungle to the east of where they were.
One of the Hmong who was out some distance away standing watch said something and everyone started to move for cover.
Moments later gunfire erupted.
45
Phommasanh yelled orders and his men scattered for cover.
Porter and Kiera dropped into the protective walls of the grave.
Porter pulled the backpacks down with them. “Help me get the elephant down.”
Filled with adrenaline, they grabbed the golden elephant and managed to wrestle it down into the safety of the grave, putting it back inside the box.
The grave wasn’t deep, only about three feet, but gave them the cover they needed.
For the second time Kiera found herself in the midst of a violent assault. But this one didn’t end quickly. It degenerated into a firefight.
Kiera, heart pounding, pressed her face against the wall of the grave, the
dirt chalky on her lips and in her mouth.
Burst after burst of automatic weapon fire blew rocks and dirt in on top of them.
Porter rose and fired back with his Glock, and then he told her to stay down. He scrambled out, leaving her there.
She remained pressed against the side of the grave beside the golden elephant as the gunfire roared around her, then decided to cover the golden elephant as best she could, even if only from rock and dirt that might end up in the grave from the intense gunfire.
She heard Phommasanh and Tang shouting orders and the return fire growing more intense.
Almost at the same instant one of the Hmong men fell on the edge of the grave. He lay half-in and half-out, blood all over his face and neck.
Kiera reached to try to staunch the wound, but knew the man was beyond any hope when she saw the horrible wound on the side of his head and another in his neck. She pushed him up on the edge of the grave.
Moments later Porter crawled back in. “We have them pretty well pinned down.”
“Who are they?”
“Don’t know.”
He checked the clip in his Glock and handed it to her. “Get yourself ready to go. Get your pack on.”
“What? Where?”
He took the dead man’s AK and his ammo pouch.
“Just be ready.” Porter said. “I’ll be right back. Stay down.”
Before she could do or say anything he vanished, leaving her alone with the dead man and the statue.
The dead man above her jerked every time bullets struck him and that was enough to keep her from putting her head up.
She pulled on her pack and sat against the grave wall listening to the shouting and gunfire of combat. Then a stillness came over the jungle.
When Porter rolled back into the grave he said, “We won the first round. They retreated back into the big boulders to the east.”
“You still don’t know who they are?”
“Bandits of one kind or another. Probably just another hired gang and they don’t seem to have the desire to close the deal. They’re yelling in Chinese. Remnants of the old KMT defeated by Mao run a lot of the drug trade from Laos to Burma. You’re getting out of here with Narith. We need to get more Hmong up here. Phommasanh can’t get hold of his mahout. The man isn’t answering his radio.”
Lethal Redemption Page 17